A pamphlet war is a kind of rhetorical battle between two or more authors who have opposing viewpoints. An initial pamphlet is published, perhaps targeting another writer (though more commonly simply advocating a certain view), which receives a direct response from another author. Occasionally the initial writer will respond, or another will on his behalf, and so on and so forth until the debate naturally dies down.
Pamphlet wars are particularly interesting because they often saw authors veer off course and attack the opposing writer(s) in addition to, or in place of, their original target, be that an idea or a person.
William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633-45, was one such target. He was executed in 1645 because his Laudian religious policies and reforms had been deemed excessively authoritarian and Popish, leading to a charge of treason. Between his imprisonment in 1641 and his execution, he faced consistent attacks in the popular press, which rarely saw any material published in his favour or defence. Woodcuts were frequently used not just to identify him but to mock and deride him. An anonymous pamphlet from 1644 used a woodcut on its title page to caricaturize and denounce Laud, presenting him as devilish, corrupt, and non-Protestant.
A short play published in 1641, and attributed to the Leveller Richard Overton, included 3 distinct and custom-made woodcuts over its mere eight pages. Just in case it wasn’t obvious enough that the reader was supposed to laugh at Laud, the title page’s woodcut is repeated at the start of Act 3, depicting him and a Jesuit in ‘a great Bird Cage together, and a foole standing by, laughing at them, Ha ha, ha ha, who is the foole now.’
That same year, an anonymous pamphlet was published entitled Mercuries Message, or The Coppy of a Letter sent to William Laud[…] which heavily criticised the imprisoned Archbishop, accusing him of ‘foule maliciousnesse’. The pamphlet has been ascribed to John Taylor (the self-styled ‘Water Poet’ whose work I’ve cited before) and, although I’m not entirely sure on what grounds this claim has been made, it seems a plausible enough attribution. That Taylor shouldn’t put his name on the work (or at the very least an anagram of it, as he had done before) is surprising but the text is primarily poetic and if not by Taylor himself is at the very least written in a very similar style. The title page declares that the pamphlet was ‘printed in the yeare, of our Prelates feare, 1641’ and contains a typical woodcut of Laud, one which merely identifies him rather than mocking him.
The woodcut is shared by The Deputies Ghost (1641), The Discontented Conference Betwixt The two great Associates (1641), Canterburys Will (1641), All to Westminster: Newes from Elizium (1641), and The Coppy Of a Letter sent by William Laud (1641) meaning that these works were likely printed by the same individual, or by printers who were sharing woodcuts, and all of them are strongly anti-Laudian. Additionally, The Deputies Ghost and The Discontented Conference also refer to 1641 as ‘the Yeare, of our Prelates feare’.
This turn of phrase is repeated in another edition of Mercuries Message from the same year, although this time the title page contains a woodcut which both depicts Laud and mocks him, presenting him as a Catholic, travelling from Canterbury to Rome. This woodcut also appears in Rome for Canterbury (1641)—a criticism of Laud as a Papist which is possibly the original source of the woodcut—as well as a ballad entitled Canterburies Conscience Convicted (1641) and a pamphlet printed for John Smith in 1643, entitled The Copy of the Petition presented to the Honourable Houses of Parliament, by the Lord Arch-Bishop of Canterbury, &c. (1643). The latter pamphlet is the only one which contains a named bookseller (and none contain the name of any author or printer), although the fact that it was produced two years after the other works means that it may have been produced by a different printer who had subsequently acquired the woodcut—and apparently decided to remove the labels for ‘Canterbury’ and ‘Rome’ which renders the woodcut one which is not inherently anti-Laudian [Note 15/12/2023: Having revisited this article, this is clearly an error. As Rachel Willie points out (p.192), the mitre is a Catholic symbol and a prized possession of Laud’s, a testament to his supposed preoccupation with religious vestments. It also seems likely that any remotely astute early modern reader would identify Canterbury and Rome without the need for labels]. A common theme among all these works, including the ones I named earlier, is that they are short (averaging fewer than ten pages) works which were designed to sell cheaply to a popular audience—and Mercuries Message is no exception.
The text is serious but begins with an argument which borders on self-parody in the eyes of a modern reader. The author takes each letter of Laud’s name (shortened to “Will Laud”) and assigns it a value on the basis of its Roman numeral equivalent.
- W = VV = 5 + 5 = 10
- I = 1
- L = 50
- L = 50
- L = 50
- A = 0 (because there is no applicable Roman numeral)
- U = V = 5
- D = 500
The author doesn’t genuinely believe that anyone whose name can be manipulated to produce the number ‘666’ is evil but this retrospective coincidence—which still requires Laud’s name to be shortened and the letter ‘W’ to be considered as two ‘V’s rather than valued at zero, as ‘A’ is—nonetheless offers the author additional ammunition against the Archbishop. The text ends with an acrostic poem for ‘William Laud Archbishop of Canterburie’—a common rhetorical device which was also employed by the author of the aforementioned 1641 ballad The Deputies Ghost (this ballad also lends one of its woodcuts to The Last Advice of William Laud (1645) so this may be another work by the same printer).
Soon after Mercuries Message had been published, a response emerged from Thomas Herbert, in the form of An Answer to The most envious, Scandalous, and Libellous Pamphlet, Entituled, Mercuries Message[…], which was ‘Printed for T. B. in the Old Bayly’ in 1641. It seems probable that the ‘T. B.’ in question is Thomas Bates, who had a bookshop in the Old Bailey and who was active in the 1640s selling primarily cheap, popular literature. Interestingly, Thomas Bates was selling John Taylor’s pamphlet John Taylors last Voyage that same year (1641). Far from making Taylor’s authorship less likely, this apparent contradiction simply reveals the dynamics of the 17th-century literature market, where profit motives meant that sellers didn’t object to selling works by literately opponents—some even sold works with contradictory political/religious messages if there was money to be made. The work doesn’t exactly defend Laud in the way that it is sometimes claimed to, as it recognises that he has been ‘lull’d asleepe’ by Satan and Herbert makes it clear that ‘I shun his actions’.
The end of the text constitutes something similar to an attempt at flyting, as Herbert composes an ‘Acrosticall Caveat’ of his own. This time, the acrostic is of a command to ‘Beware of hypocrisie it is the way to Hell.’ Perhaps the most interesting and memorable parts of this response are not those concerned with Laud at all, but rather the criticisms of the author of Mercuries Message.
Thou wantedst money when thou writst thy Letter,
And by thy scandall made thy state grow better;
Thou art some Poet to the short hair’d crew,
Who long since bid to honesty adue:
Thou wilt not swear, but lie, I know thou wilt,
Thy actions are not pure, yet purely gilt,
[…]
It did sell well, would’st know the reason why?
Each man desir’d to reade thy knavery;
I wonder much thy name thou durst not show,
That all the world thy witty parts might know;
It was your modesty I doe suppose,
Or else for feare, Brandon should get your hose,
These comments form a metacommentary on the pamphlet war itself and, if we suppose that Herbert is telling the truth, show that Mercuries Message was a popular pamphlet at the time. Herbert claims the moral high ground by asserting that the author he is responding to is nothing more than a ‘Libeller’ who wants to make a quick buck by lying and slandering.
There were two pamphlets which fired shots back, both apparently by the same person (the initial author of Mercuries Message). One of them was entitled A Second Message to Mr William Laud (1641) and included a postscript in which the author responds to Herbert’s criticism. The author repurposes Herbert’s opening words (‘How Now…’) and describes his work as ‘Some foolish Pamphlet of the Popish crew’. Additionally, there is a promise that ‘The Authors Answer will come forth ere long,/And cut and slash him deepe, but wont him wrong.’ This promise, of course, is made primarily for the reader, rather than Herbert himself. There’s no reason to doubt that this work is by the same author and printed by the same printer (or an associate), not least because the woodcut on the title page is the same one which appears on the aforementioned ballad Canterburies Conscience Convicted (1641).
Sure enough, a pamphlet entitled Mercuries Message Defended, against the vain, foolish, simple, and absurd cavils of Thomas Herbert a ridiculous Ballad-maker (1641) was soon published. This pamphlet is a goldmine of ad hominem attacks and witty lampoons. If the author is indeed John Taylor, it’s interesting that he chooses to explicitly attack Herbert for being poor and nothing but a mere ballad-maker (which is not exactly true, since most of Herbert’s surviving works are pamphlets) because Taylor was often criticised himself for having no university education (he didn’t even fully complete grammar school) and frequently justified his literary existence at the beginning of his works.
He targets the woodcuts used by Herbert in his response (shown above):
In the next place, to fill up the Title, we have the resemblance of an arme holding a knife fast clencht, as though you had lately made some desperate fray among the two penny pudding-pies in Fleet-lane, or perhaps you set it there as a direction to your friends to be in readinesse to cut the rope when you were catcht in a twist for your saucy poetry
He then moves on to the portrait of Laud which appears on the next page:
Turne over, behold and wonder, Ha—what’s here? a flat cap, narrow ruffe, and lawne sleeves, sure it stands for the Bishop of Canterbury; but I hope his sorrows have not so strangely metamorphos’d him; Do’s he learne to tumble in a hoope tro? perhaps he intends to shew tricks in Bartholmew Faire; I remember there was a sight last yeer called, The decollation of Iohn the baptist, wherein a boyes head was cut off through a table;
The way that the author narrates his turning over the page, as though he is writing the response as he goes along is an interesting rhetorical device and possibly a response to a similar tactic in Herbert’s initial response, which begins:
How now! what ist which I doe vainly read,
Ought which belongs to Popish Romish Creed?
I am deceiv’d, it is a Letter call’d,
(At which I blusht) A hypocriticke scal’d
The author’s criticism gets much more personal, however, as he mocks Herbert for being ‘a poor threedbare ballad-maker’ whose songs are sung in ‘blind alehouse[s]’ in ‘stinking Alley[s]’. The author returns to Herbert one of his own criticisms, that he is only writing in order to make money:
when his [Herbert’s] money is all spent, (as for the most part it is six or seven times a week) [he] writes a new merry book, a good godly Ballad, or some such excellent piece of stuffe even as the droppings of the spigot inliveneth his muddy muse, to put his feeble purse in fresh stocke again
As for the value of his ballads, the author denigrates Herbert’s work by stating that if a man is ‘taken with a sudden fit of the winde-collicke [he] runs presently and enters this his penny worth into Sir Ajax his Office’—in other words, Herbert’s ballads make good toilet paper. This criticism—that cheap print was more valuable as toilet paper than reading material and was soon forgotten—was a common one at the time and one which Taylor would likely have faced either directly or implicitly, because he often produced short, cheap work, so it is interesting to see him redirect (or perhaps unknowingly project) this criticism onto Herbert, if he is the author of this work.
The strongest evidence that this might be John Taylor’s work is the pamphlet’s titular woodcut. It depicts Thomas Herbert holding a pamphlet or ballad entitled ‘Herbert’s answer’ which he is attempting to give to William Laud, who is imprisoned in the Tower of London. Behind Herbert, and of which he is apparently unaware, a man is tying him to the gallows, urging him to ‘Come up sirra’, claiming ‘Here’s your reward.’ This woodcut is certainly custom-made to insult Herbert and, by including him in the scene, pulls Herbert himself into the debate. No longer are two authors simply debating the state of William Laud but now one of the authors is himself unwittingly drawn into the fray (in both senses) where he is targeted in addition to—and in fact more than—Laud himself.
These pamphlets, which usually attack but occasionally defend William Laud are a microcosm of the cheap print market in 17th-century London. Woodcuts are harnessed to mock scorned individuals and ideas, authors target not only their opponent’s ideas but their motives and personal qualities, and booksellers do not hesitate to promote works by authors whose views are in perpetual conflict. Because if there’s one mantra which remains as true today in the age of tabloids and social media as it did in a London dominated by cheap pamphlets and ballads, it’s that drama sells.
